Post-Election Recovery: A Chance for a Reckoning?

Last updated on: November 7, 2012 at 4:03 pm by Andre E. Johnson

Post-Election Recovery: A Chance for a Reckoning? 2012-11-07T16:03:00-05:00 Andre E. Johnson

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

by Ifeoma Ofulue
R3 Blogger

Though the election ends tonight, for American evangelicals a different kind of campaign should begin if we are serious about the place of faith-based identity and community as part of our civic engagement. It is clear to me, and to many others I’m sure, when you consider the entire slate of Republican primary candidates with professing evangelical Christians much at the helm, we have some serious reckoning to do. The past 19-months have laid bare, perhaps as never before or not as clearly, the stronghold of ethnocentricism in contemporary American evangelical culture, its political consciousness and moral imagination. Allow me in this post to break down what I mean, and why I believe the American evangelical community is long overdue for reckoning with the reality of racism in our ranks and its effects on the broader culture we seek to influence.

Adele Stan’s post yesterday is a good beginning for understanding deeply fundamental issues I have with this election cycle, particularly with rhetorics of religion, race, and gender that have surrounded it. In this regards, I agree with Stan’s assertion:

“Whether Obama wins or loses, new territory has been broken for the 21st century with the rhetoric of the Republican presidential campaign. Sure, it may seem like we’ve been here before, but the difference is that this time, it’s happening after we thought we had gotten past this level of racial hatred. But if Romney claims victory, having run on such a strategy, a new level of legitimacy will be conferred on the politics of race-baiting.”

But looking more closely at the role of faith in public life, an implicitly legitimate role I believe, there’s no getting around the fact that white evangelicals have played a peculiar role in the resurgence of racist, sexist, heterosexist ideologies at the core of one side of the current political discourse. Take Rick Santorum’s comments about not wanting to “make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money” and, his misrepresentation of President Obama on the work requirement within welfare at the Republican National Convention. For Santorum, an avowed evangelical and Romney’s chief competitor toward the end of the Republican primary, blackness and welfare are never far removed.

Even Romney’s characterization of the predominantly African American audience of NAACP delegates he addressed reinforced this frame of Black Americans as people who just want “free stuff” from the government. Romney, while not an evangelical, has been actively supported by notable evangelical leaders like Gary Bauer, former president of the Family Research Council, who in September proudly disparaged Obama voters as “an army of welfare recipients.” His running mate, Paul Ryan, another prominent evangelical Catholic just a few weeks ago attributed the problem of violent crime to a lack of character in America’s inner city communities.

Attacks against immigrants, religious minorities, African Americans, single mothers, and others, throughout this campaign, have came not from the margins of our culture but from within public leadership, out of the mouths of elected officials who proudly identify and cloak themselves in the evangelical Christian tradition. Through my research, I’ve come to understand their ascendancy to national leadership is as much a testament to the success of their religious self-representation as to their political heft. Indisputably, white evangelical leaders–who have become the American face of an entire tradition–have volunteered and successfully leveraged their voices to give renewed legitimacy to an old and narrow socio-political standpoint. The entire republican presidential campaign has satisfied decades-long efforts of a subset of evangelicals seeking to “recover” neo-traditional ideals of gender, family, and economics not just in church but in the larger society. No doubt, these evangelicals are satisfied with their efforts.

For so long, America’s growing pluralism has been the object of white evangelical angst, a perceived threat to American identity. The twin evils of feminism and secular humanism are the culprits, out to destroy the social, political, and economic order of a world they understand as intrinsically God-ordained–a Christian social order that is distinctly American, predominantly Anglo-centric. Most of us get the incongruities here, especially those of us evangelicals who hail from other parts of the world. But among white American evangelicals, ignorance and denial are widespread. So too is the fear of the consequences of speaking publicly about the stronghold of racism, which has always intersected with gender and sexuality throughout American history.

In this election cycle, evangelical candidates of various denominations have made much about how faith informs their personal morality, public vocation, and political platform. Sadly, it has played out in cheap politics driven by concern for individualist economic interests and sanctified by anti-abortion, anti-feminism, and anti-homosexuality moralism. This deludes both candidates and voters to believe they have done their due diligence in trying to reconcile their spiritual commitments to the complex realities in which we all live. Nope. Not by a long shot.

Evangelicals in the United States, white and non-white, must take what this campaign season has revealed about our community and begin to account for the contempt and divisiveness that makes enemies of our fellow citizens. For those who are serious, may I suggest you begin with Emerson and Smith’s Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America (2001)?

Uncategorized

Previous Post

November 7, 2012

Welcome Our New Blogger: Ifeoma Ofulue

Next Post

November 7, 2012 Tenuous Duality of Election Day

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category Amy Steele Andre E. Johnson Book Reviews/Series Brian Foulks Call for Chapters Carol Howard Merritt Classes Conferences Contributors Crystal St.Marie Lewis Daniel White Hodge Earle Fisher Eulogy Fredrick Robinson Guest Contributions Henry McNeal Turner Institutes Interviews Joseph Boston Katherine Whitfield Kimberly Peeler-Ringer Lectures/Roundtables Natalie Bullock Brown R3 Book Series R3 Contributor Rashad Grove Readers Reflections Symposiums Teaching Traci Ellis Travis Harris Uncategorized Video

Select a Month June 2020 February 2020 December 2019 November 2019 July 2019 June 2019 May 2019 October 2018 June 2018 May 2018 April 2018 March 2018 February 2018 January 2018 December 2017 November 2017 October 2017 September 2017 August 2017 July 2017 June 2017 May 2017 April 2017 March 2017 February 2017 January 2017 December 2016 November 2016 October 2016 September 2016 August 2016 July 2016 June 2016 May 2016 April 2016 March 2016 February 2016 January 2016 December 2015 November 2015 October 2015 September 2015 August 2015 July 2015 June 2015 May 2015 April 2015 March 2015 February 2015 January 2015 December 2014 November 2014 October 2014 September 2014 August 2014 July 2014 June 2014 May 2014 April 2014 March 2014 February 2014 January 2014 December 2013 November 2013 October 2013 September 2013 August 2013 July 2013 June 2013 May 2013 April 2013 March 2013 February 2013 January 2013 December 2012 November 2012 October 2012 September 2012 August 2012 July 2012 June 2012 May 2012 April 2012 March 2012 February 2012 January 2012 December 2011 November 2011 October 2011

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz